Inside the Westminster Menswear Archive is a unique guide to the role of garment archives as an industry resource for designers to research and examine both historical garments and the work of their peers.
With exclusive access to over 120 key garments from the Westminster Menswear Archive, spanning the last 275 years, each piece is brilliantly photographed in close-up detail and annotated with curator commentary, to inspire new generations of designers.
Highlights include garments from: A-COLD-WALL*, Ahluwalia, Aitor Throup Studio, Alexander McQueen, Belstaff, Bernhard Willhelm, Burberry, Casely-Hayford, C.P. Company, Carol Christian Poell, Comme des Garçons, Craig Green, Dior Men, Fred Perry, Helmut Lang, Hussein Chalayan, Jean Paul Gaultier, Junya Watanabe, Louis Vuitton, Martine Rose, Meadham Kirchhoff, Nigel Cabourn, Paul Smith, Prada, Stone Island, Umbro, Undercover, Vexed Generation, and Vollebak.
The Westminster Menswear Archive allows us a unique, non-hierarchical insight into menswear, a space where it is possible to examine anonymous everyday clothing alongside the work of celebrated designers and retailers and to contrast clothing constructed for utilitarian purposes with clothing made for leisure. Most significantly it collapses the distance between the past and the present, the unique and the commonplace allowing us to understand the history of menswear as a process that is continually evolving.
